Category: Miguel’s Reviews

TALK RADIO (1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone
CAST: Eric Bogosian, Ellen Greene, John C. McGinley, Alec Baldwin, Michael Wincott
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 82% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A rude, contemptuous talk show host becomes overwhelmed by the hatred that surrounds his program just before it goes national.


Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio is entertaining and, at times, mesmerizing without being an altogether enjoyable experience.  I salute the craft of the film and the bravura performance by Eric Bogosian, reprising the role he created on Broadway, but despite my high score, I’m not quite sure to whom I would recommend this film.  I believe it’s an important placeholder in Stone’s filmography, coming as it does after Wall Street and before Born on the Fourth of July.  It shows immense faith in the material and portrays its characters with brutal honesty.  The closest comparison I can make is to the Safdie Brothers film Uncut Gems.  Both films are fraught with tension, featuring unlikable fast-talking main characters who tend to step on or over or around the people closest to them to achieve their goal, or sometimes just to get their own way.  They’re fascinating to watch and listen to, but I would not want to be stuck in an elevator with them.

Talk Radio centers on a Dallas radio shock jock named Barry Champlain.  Bogosian’s look and performance seems so closely modeled on Howard Stern that I’m surprised Stern didn’t sue the filmmakers for not obtaining his permission to do so.  (In fact, the Barry character is modeled after real life talk show host Alan Berg, who was gunned down by an ultra-right-wing group in 1984.)  The whole first “act” of the film takes place in and around the broadcasting booth where Barry holds court, listening to and berating callers from all walks of life on topics ranging from “I Love Lucy” to the war on drugs to Holocaust deniers to one dude who eats dinner with his cat every night.  If nothing else, this sequence boosted my respect for anyone in Barry’s line of work.  To be able to take calls from random folks with random issues, and to somehow spin their questions or problems into a mini-monologue or diatribe that manages to entertain or offend – usually both – the caller or the listening audience – usually both – is a skill I will never possess.  (Bogosian’s voice is tailor-made for the role, a nice sweet-spot baritone that sounds as if he’s been doing radio for years.)

Mixed in with the calls are the ones from clear-cut racists, warning Barry that they know where he lives, that they know “Champlain” is not his real last name, calling him Jew-boy and “f—-t”, sending him packages in the mail and claiming they’re bombs.  One loathsome item is sent to him wrapped in a Nazi flag.  Other callers don’t seem to have any affiliation at all aside from their utter hatred of Barry Champlain.  There’s a scene where Barry has been invited to a public event to introduce someone.  The moment he takes the stage, there are a few cheers that are eventually drowned out by a sea of boos and jeers in concert with a hailstorm of food and garbage thrown by the audience.  Barry has the nerve to look a little shocked.  I remember thinking, “How can you not expect this kind of reception?”

But then I remember thinking, about the audience members this time, “Well, if you hate him so much, why are you listening to his show?”  The movie is making a statement about the bizarre relationship between the general public and entertainment celebrities that they “love to hate.”  It seems to me their lives would be infinitely happier and less angry if they just switched over to NPR or smooth jazz once in a while.  No one forces them, or anyone, to engage with a TV show or movie or radio show or anything else they don’t like.  But with Barry, and presumably many other shock jocks in real life, people seem to need them, to use them as an excuse, I guess, to get riled up, to feel fueled by righteous anger.  The shock jocks are handy targets, especially because the callers can remain anonymous, much like social media.

There is a long rant from Barry himself about this phenomenon late in the film.  There was a plan for his show to go national, but it has been derailed for nebulous reasons, and so a broadcast intended for the entire country is still confined to the Dallas area.  After an ill-advised guest appearance by a stoned idiot (Michael Wincott!) and a couple of calls that go completely off the rails, Barry loses it and tells his listeners:

“You’re happiest when others are in pain.  That’s where I come in, isn’t it?  I’m here to lead you by the hands through the dark forest of your own hatred and anger and humiliation.  I’m providing a public service. … I come in here every night, I tear into you, I abuse you, I insult you, you just keep coming back for more.  What’s wrong with you, why do you keep calling?”

In another movie, that kind of rant might skew towards comedy.  Here, it serves as a painful peek into the psyche of a man who has a job that he’s good at, but there’s a part of him that despises himself for it, and that self-loathing has overflowed the boundaries of his own soul onto and over his listeners.  Even he can’t understand what his audience is thinking. I found myself wondering if any other shock jocks out there might feel this way.  I wonder if this might be one of Howard Stern’s favorite movies, or if it was one of Don Imus’s favorites.  I have never listened to either one of their shows because…well, because that’s my right as a human being.  But I wonder, nevertheless.

As I said before, I admire the craft of the film.  Stone and his collaborators (especially cinematographer Robert Richardson) do a great job with creative camera angles, lighting, and editing for those long stretches of the film where we simply sit and listen to Barry Champlain talking to that endless stream of callers.  Most of those calls end threateningly or are threatening throughout.  This has the effect of creating tension almost out of thin air, a tension that suffuses the entire film.  Are we going to get a maniac who takes Barry hostage on the air?  When Barry unwisely invites a listener to come down to the station and appear on the air, we’re thinking, “You idiot, he’s going to kill you!”  Even if none of that happens, we’re worried about it the entire time.  While this method is an effective use of cinema, as I said before, I cannot honestly say I had a “good time” watching it.  When the ending comes and the final credits roll, I will carefully say that there was a sense of relief, not at how it ended, but just relief that it ended.

Talk Radio is a well-made film featuring a stellar performance from Eric Bogosian.  If you sit down to watch it, I believe you will feel exactly what Oliver Stone meant for you to feel.  Just don’t expect it to tickle.

THE VANISHING (Netherlands, 1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: George Sluizer
CAST: Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Fresh

PLOT: A young couple, Rex and Saskia, stop at a service station during a road trip.  Saskia vanishes without a trace, prompting a years-long search by Rex…while an unassuming family man monitors his progress.


[WARNING: This review contains unavoidable spoilers.  If you have any plans to see this movie, trust me…stop reading now.]

I went into The Vanishing absolutely cold.  I knew nothing about it aside from the name of the director, the bare outlines of the plot (a young woman vanishes while on vacation), and the fact it was a critically acclaimed foreign film, remade in America with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland, which I never saw because it was, quote, “laughable, stupid and crude” (Roger Ebert).

With absolutely no gore, no unnecessary side plots, and no clichéd final chase between the killer and the cops where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, director George Sluizer has crafted one of the most compelling, creepiest abduction films I’ve ever seen.  By not showing the actual abduction when it happens, by focusing on the boyfriend’s frantic attempts to track her down immediately afterwards, and by abruptly shifting gears twice in the first hour, the viewer is kept constantly off balance (in a good way).  If she was abducted, how did the kidnapper accomplish his task in broad daylight?  WAS it even an abduction?  We get a good look at the person who most likely committed the crime, but his process looks almost comic…how did he pull it off?

We first meet Rex and Saskia as they’re driving to France to do some cycling.  After Saskia relates a recurring nightmare to Rex (she dreams of being trapped inside a golden egg floating through space), there is an early crisis when their car runs out of gas in the middle of a long tunnel.  We get an early, incisive look at their relationship when Rex elects to walk back for gas, while Saskia stays behind frantically looking for a flashlight she insists they will need.  Later, at a crowded service station, they kiss and make up.

This scene at the service station looks entirely mundane at first, but it is interrupted by a sequence in which we are shown the man who pretty clearly is about to commit a kidnapping.  When we cut back to Rex and Saskia, their interactions become charged with tension.  They talk and tease and kiss, while we are suddenly hyper-aware of their surroundings.  Director Sluizer fills the background with extras, and we start scrutinizing them to see if any of them might be the kidnapper.  Or perhaps there will be a clue later, a Hitchcockian callback which relies on our recall of the crowd scenes.  Rex takes a random Polaroid as a blue semi rolls past the lens, obscuring the front of the store.  Sluizer’s camera lingers on the semi, and we immediately wonder if there is any significance.  (There both is and isn’t.)

The creepy effect of these scenes cannot be overstated.  I can easily imagine some people watching this movie and immediately changing their travel habits.  Never go into a crowded store alone.  Carry mace.  If you must separate, stay in touch with your cellphone until you meet up again.  Stanley Kubrick knew what he was talking about when he told Sluizer that The Vanishing was the most terrifying movie he’d ever seen.

After Saskia’s disappearance, there are the nominal scenes of Rex searching the store and grounds for her, asking if anyone has seen her, giving her description, and so on.  Interestingly, we never get a scene of Rex being interviewed by the police as the day drags on.  Looking back on it now, I get the feeling that Sluizer perhaps thought those scenes would be way too familiar for audiences who have sat through any number of police procedurals in the movies and on TV.  Better to stay with the matter at hand and keep the story moving.

It’s at this point that the movie makes its first abrupt shift in tone and focus.  With no warning, we suddenly spend a good 20-30 minutes, not with Rex’s search, but with the apparently happy family life of the man we got a good look at earlier in the film, the man who appeared to be prepping for a crime.  These scenes are even creepier than the earlier scenes at the service station because we are pretty sure this is the kidnapper, but his home life seems stable: a wife, two daughters, a well-paying job as a chemistry teacher, and the financial wherewithal to buy a large farmhouse in the country…where we discover, in an INTENSELY creepy moment, that no neighbors will hear any screaming.

The decision to focus on this man was jarring and disturbing to me, but in that good way achieved only by the best crime thrillers.  We get more details about his life and his “preparations” that I won’t spoil here.  The film almost seems to have forgotten all about Rex and Saskia; this man is now the primary character.  (In fact, this actor gets top billing in the credits).  He has the kind of forgettable face and unimposing persona that would fly under anyone’s radar.  By showing us the fact that he has two sides to his personality, we come to the uneasy realization that evil could easily lurk behind the cheerful facades of just about anyone we meet.  This concept is far more terrifying to me than a slasher wearing a mask.

But The Vanishing has two more tricks up its sleeve.  It takes yet another dramatic shift when we abruptly jump forward three years.  Saskia is still missing.  Rex has a new girlfriend, but he still posts flyers asking for any information on Saskia.  He makes appearances on local news programs, pleading for the perpetrator to step forward, promising not to press charges; he just has to know whether Saskia is alive or dead.  He craves closure more than anything else.  It has consumed him.  And…he has received several anonymous postcards from the kidnapper asking to meet in a public place, but whenever Rex arrives, the kidnapper has never shown himself.

This creeped me out even more than I had already been.  But the screws get tighter still.  At one point, the kidnapper offers Rex a choice: turn me in, in which case you’ll never find out what happened to Saskia, or I show you what happened to her…by going through the same ordeal she did.

This has all SORTS of psychological implications that I don’t feel fully qualified to sort out.  I have to wonder about those families and friends who have suffered through the disappearance of a loved one.  (I looked up the statistics on missing persons on a whim…they are horribly depressing.)  I can only imagine what those people would do to finally get closure on what happened.  Would they accept this kidnapper’s offer?  Even if it means they might possibly die?  What price would they be willing to pay to finally get an answer after years of searching?

I hope I never have to answer that question.  Rex goes back and forth in agony before finally making his choice.  His decision leads to an ending that was probably inevitable, but which still took me by surprise.

In an interview with the actress who played Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), she states that when the movie was finally released, she was deeply disturbed.  She went to George Sluizer and asked him, “What is the point of this movie?  What do you achieve by telling this kind of disturbing story?  What are you trying to tell the audience?”  If I had to answer that question, I would say that the first motive was to make an entertaining crime thriller, which it is.  But perhaps there’s also a deeper statement about the banality of evil.  One does not have to wear a black hat and twirl his mustache to be the bad guy.  Sometimes you just have to blend into the background.  The film opens and closes with shots that include a praying mantis, a creature that relies on stealth and speed to capture its prey.  The kidnapper in The Vanishing has learned that lesson in spades.

GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL (1957)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: John Sturges
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, John Ireland, DeForest Kelley, and a young bit player named Dennis Hopper
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Fresh

PLOT: Lawman Wyatt Earp and outlaw Doc Holliday form an unlikely alliance which culminates in their participation in the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.


In real life, the legendary gunfight at the O.K Corral in the frontier town of Tombstone lasted thirty seconds, but what kind of movie would that be?  (Kill Bill: Vol. 2 springs to mind…)  A 1950’s Western requires a long-to-medium shot of the good guys – Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday – striding down the street to meet the challenge of the dastardly Clantons, who had gunned down Wyatt’s youngest brother in cold blood.  We need a gunfight, not too long, but longer than 30 seconds.  And we need to make sure the ratio of surviving bad guys to good guys is just right: 0 to all.

John Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral delivers the goods in a remarkably mature film for its time, free (for the most part) of cheap sentimentality and distractions from the main plot.  That’s a double-edged sword, though: we rarely leave the side of either Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, but the result is we get little to no information about Earp’s brothers until the final reel, nor do we get many details about Earp’s romance with the lovely Laura Denbow, a high-class gambler who knows enough about cards to beat the men at their own game.  We only find out they’re engaged as an afterthought, it seems.

As for Doc Holliday’s relationship with Kate Fisher (Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet), the word “dysfunctional” is woefully inadequate.  Loosely based on Holliday’s real mistress, referred to only as “Big Nose Kate” on Wikipedia, she seems to exist only to serve as Holliday’s psychological punching bag when required.  Her emotional yo-yoing gave me whiplash: she pledges her unending devotion in one scene, tries to stab him in another, helps him escape a lynch mob, takes up with the loathsome Johnny Ringo after yet another fight, begs to be taken back, and eventually tells him, “I’ll see you dead!”  With friends like these…

But even that kind of sordid melodrama is not enough to derail the throughline of the film, which is focused intently on establishing the rocky relationship between the morally good Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) – who nevertheless wears a black hat the entire film – and the morally chaotic Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas), a professional gambler who leaves a string of dead bodies behind him, all killed in self-defense, of course.  Earp also helps get Holliday out of town before a mob can lynch him, so Holliday decides to stick around until the debt is paid.

I think the essence of their relationship is summed up in a scene where Earp is forced to deputize Holliday when no other options are available.  Earp reluctantly walks up to Doc, tells him to raise his right hand, and says, “Do you solemnly swear to uphold…oh, this is ridiculous.  You’re deputized.”  Doc: “Wait a minute, don’t I get to wear a tin star?”  Earp: “Not on your life!”  Both men are torn between their philosophy and their sense of honor.  Holliday is no hero, but he’ll help Wyatt until his debt is paid.  Earp despises Holliday’s moral code, but he’s the best gunslinger in town.  What can you do?

All of this is handled in dialogue that seems mostly uncluttered by the hokey clichés I’ve heard in so many other films of the 1950s, even some of the great ones.  This may perhaps be due to the fact the screenplay was written by Leon Uris, a novelist who would eventually go on to write, among many others, Exodus, Topaz, and QB VII.  Listening to the characters talk, it was interesting to hear how natural they sounded, compared to the overblown melodrama of so many other westerns and dramas of that era.  The dialogue was clearly written by someone with a writer’s ear, who wants to get to the point of every scene with a minimum of fuss or flowery exposition.

As I mentioned, however, this quest for directness means we spend all our time with Earp and Holliday and almost no time at all with the Clantons or Earp’s brothers or anyone else.  By the time we hear Wyatt’s brother, Virgil, is in trouble, we’ve almost forgotten he HAS brothers.  As far as the Clantons go, we hear everything about them secondhand until we finally meet them in Tombstone.  We never even see Wyatt propose to Laura; we barely even see them courting (their courtship appears to consist of one false arrest and one kiss in the moonlight).

And I would be remiss if I did not mention…that song.  I learn from IMDb that the song, “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” that plays over the opening and closing credits, and which also plays over any transitional scene as Earp moves from one town to the next, was one of the inspirations for the theme song for Mel Brooks’s parody Blazing Saddles.  Brooks even got the original artist, Frankie Laine, to sing for his own movie.  It is so corny and earnest, juxtaposed against the gritty characters and scenery, that any sequence featuring that song loses all credibility.  If the filmmakers had just ditched that song, I might consider this one of the greatest Westerns of all time.  (see also Rio Bravo with Ricky Nelson’s crooning.)

But…having said all that, I must report that Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was entertaining from start to finish.  By avoiding the temptations to give in to melodrama and hokeyness, we are presented with a surprisingly solid Western drama that culminates in a decent (for the late ‘50s) gun battle.  It’s not as flashy as anything from one of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, and it’s not quite as thrilling as the one at the end of 1993’s Tombstone, but it’s satisfying, nevertheless.

(And for the record, when it comes to memorable lines, against Val Kilmer’s immortal “I’m your huckleberry”, I would gladly put Kirk Douglas’s venomous, “You slut!” …you have to see it in context, trust me.)

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Italy, 2017)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Luca Guadagnino
CAST: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1980s Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father’s research assistant.


Call Me by Your Name is remarkable because it tells a heartbreaking first-love story that could have easily devolved into cheap melodrama.  I mean, look at the plot description above.  It has “soap opera” written all over it.  But because director Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, the 2018 remake of Suspiria) applies restraint, and because the screenplay by James Ivory (of Merchant Ivory fame) sticks to realism as opposed to predictable scripted nonsense, and because of the fearlessness of the film’s two leads, Call Me by Your Name becomes one of the best films about the thrill and heartbreak of first love I’ve ever seen.

The story takes place in the summer of 1983, in Italy.  The Perlmans are on vacation at their villa in the Italian countryside.  Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) has hired an American, Oliver (Armie Hammer), to assist him with research over the holiday.  Elio (Timothée Chalamet), Mr. Perlman’s 17-year-old son, appears to take an instant dislike to Oliver, but we later see this is a maneuver designed to disguise his real, and scary, crush on Oliver.

…but I don’t want to write a full synopsis of the story, because I guarantee it would read like someone’s Twilight fan-fiction or something similar.  What happens is reasonably predictable and has been seen in countless movies from Douglas Sirk to Nora Ephron.  What makes this movie special is how it happens.

There is not a single scene or shot in the movie that feels routine.  Or, not “routine”, that’s not the right word.  The whole movie feels authentic.  Nobody talks in screenplay-ese (except for a sensational speech from Mr. Perlman near the end, which I will forgive because it works).  Whatever happens, whenever it happens, feels spontaneous and precisely observed.

Here is at least one moment that captures what I mean.  Elio’s crush on Oliver has gotten deeper, but he’s kept it to himself.  One night, the two of them and a bunch of Elio’s friends visit a local bar with an outdoor dance floor.  Oliver starts dancing with a pretty girl.  Elio’s friends get up to dance, but Elio stays behind, eyeing Oliver and the girl, and you can almost hear the gears turning over in Elio’s head.  He finally does get up to dance, but watch his movements carefully: he starts dancing with a girl, but surreptitiously moves closer to Oliver for a moment.  Oliver turns to Elio, and Elio abruptly turns away and pulls a little move and slide, pretending not to notice Oliver while also trying to impress him a little.  Elio turns back, sees that Oliver is no longer looking, and quickly moves back towards him.  This kind of behavior is so specific, and yet universally recognizable.  There was no dialogue, but I knew everything going through Elio’s head in every second of that scene.

I also admired the scene, done in one take, where Elio finally reveals his feelings to Oliver, but it’s all done in this marvelous code, where Elio never actually says precisely what he’s talking about, but Oliver is smart enough to decipher the code.  (“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”)  I’ve seen so many films where the Oliver character is written as an otherwise adult person but has to be incredibly dumb in order to prolong the “idiot plot.”  How refreshing to be confronted with characters with working brains.

Guadagnino also appears to be a great fan of Japanese films, particularly those of Yasujiro Ozu.  Throughout the movie, there are many scenes that are divided, almost like chapter headings, by a series of stationary shots, held for several seconds, of ordinary items: a window, or a staircase, or the still waters of a lake, or an apricot tree.  Ozu was known for doing the same thing in his films; they were called “pillow shots,” because Japanese poetry utilizes the same device, using words instead of shots, to separate thoughts or ideas.  These “pillow shots” lend a sense of poetry or…I don’t know what, exactly, to the film.  It may look (and sound) a little pretentious, but trust me, it works.  It made the movie feel as if there were great currents of significance rumbling below the surface.

Alert readers may notice I haven’t even mentioned the sex scenes yet.  Going into this movie, I remembered that there was some hoopla about the graphic nature of those scenes, but I get the feeling they’re like the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs: everyone thinks they remember seeing the ear actually getting cut off, but we don’t.  Tarantino tactfully moves the camera up and away and leaves the dismemberment off-camera.  Same thing here.  Guadagnino leaves no doubt as to what is about to happen, but then moves the camera away, or cuts to the next scene, or expertly positions the camera so the naughtiest actions are never actually seen.

This is shrewd filmmaking.  If the film had been filled with NC-17-worthy content, the message would have been lost.  It would have become a movie about the sex instead of being about the turmoil and ecstasy of being in love with someone who loves you back, even if it’s only for a short time.

I should also mention the roles of Elio’s parents.  I can see how some people might watch the movie and imagine that his parents are far too forgiving, especially given their religious upbringing.  However, this was another welcome departure from the realms of unnecessary melodrama.  Instead of scenes where the furious parents make unreasonable demands or deliver intolerant lectures, we are given a father and mother who know enough about parenting, and about their son, to realize when it’s time to lecture and when it’s time to just let things happen.  I’m not suggesting they would ever willingly allow their son to go into harm’s way.  But they’re smart enough to know how important it is that Oliver and Elio take a little sabbatical together before Oliver’s final departure.

(They also know when a small lie is sometimes necessary at the appropriate moment.  After Mr. Perlman’s wonderful speech at the end of the film, Elio asks him, “Does mother know?”  Mr. Perlman hesitates, then delivers a very tactful answer.  To me, this was his way of protecting his son at a time when he desperately needed comfort.  I suppose it could be interpreted either way, but since Mr. Perlman knows his wife, I believe it was a perfectly timed lie.  Just a small one.  It’s a magnificent button to the scene.)

Call Me by Your Name deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay that year.  It’s a masterpiece of storytelling by osmosis, without using signal flags or hokey dialogue.  It recalls with perfect precision how it feels to be uplifted and crushed emotionally, and how one must decide how to deal with those feelings.  I was never the 17-year-old son of a professor with romantic feelings for his assistant, but I understood and identified with Elio nearly every step of the way during the movie.  I would imagine many others can, too.

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Dean Fleischer Camp
CAST: Jenny Slate, Dean Fleischer Camp, Isabella Rossellini
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Fresh

PLOT: Marcel, a tiny talking seashell with big shoes and one googly eye, becomes the subject of a documentary.


Years ago, I went to see Happy Feet.  The premise was absurd – singing penguins, give me a break – but as soon as Nicole Kidman’s character sang the first words of Prince’s Kiss, I remember thinking, “Okay, this movie is only going to work if I just give in to the concept.”  I did, and it did (for the most part).  Some movies are like that.  If you’re the kind of person who brings too much logic to the movie theater, who’s always wondering, when a movie character just orders “a beer” at a bar, how does the bartender know what to bring him…if you’re that kind of person, then Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is not for you.  Trust me.  I’m trying to give a public service message here.  If you watch a James Bond movie and sit there the whole time going, “That couldn’t happen…that couldn’t happen”…then skip Marcel and go find a Werner Herzog documentary.  Cave of Forgotten Dreams is excellent.

However, if you enjoy flights of fancy, fits of whimsy, and a gently aggressive cuteness factor balanced nicely by, not one, but two potentially tear-jerking plot developments – all centered on a talking seashell – then have I got a movie for you.

The story: A down-on-his-luck documentary filmmaker (Dean Fleischer Camp) moves into an Airbnb with his dog.  After following some odd clues around the house, he discovers his diminutive roommate: Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate), a pebble-sized seashell with one eye – a googly eye – and tiny shoes, with a voice that sounds like your favorite childhood puppy was granted the gift of speech.  Dean discovers that Marcel has lived in this house for some time with his grandmother, Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini!).  There used to be an entire community, including many of Marcel’s family members, but they all vanished one traumatic night when the couple that used to live in the Airbnb got into an argument and the man stormed off with his luggage…carrying some unwitting passengers.

Now Marcel fends for himself, while Nana Connie helps in the garden.  Dean, the filmmaker, asks some excellent questions.  How does Marcel get around the house?  Why, by traveling inside a tennis ball using it like a tiny hamster ball; it’s okay as long as you don’t mind knocking some things over every once in a while.  What does he eat?  Mostly fruit from the tree growing outside.  How does Marcel get it out of the tree all by himself?  Using the mixer in the kitchen and a long length of rope, of course.  I could explain it, but it’s funnier if you find out for yourself how that works.  How does Marcel reach high places in the house?  Well, if he can’t jump it, there’s plenty of honey in the house, and honey is sticky, and that’s why there are sometimes little footprints all over the walls.  (Marcel asks Dean his own important questions: “Have you ever eaten a raspberry?  Um, and what was that like?”)

This is all unbearably cute.  I’m still not sure why I responded to it so strongly.  This is not normally my kind of material.  But the sight of this little seashell with one eye plopping down in front of the TV to watch 60 Minutes with his Nana just brought a smile to my face.  (Marcel explains, “We just call it ‘the show.’  That’s how much we love it.”)

One of the most charming elements of this movie is how it trucks along giving us one cuteness blast after another, and then it blindsides you with sentiments that are so simple and direct that they hit you in the feels before you even realize what’s happened.  As Marcel recounts the story of his family’s disappearance that fateful night, he sheds a tear or two.  Then he says:

“And then the next day, there was a really sunny day with a good breeze.  And I just remember thinking, if I was somebody else, I would really be enjoying this.”

I don’t know about you, but that statement really hits home with me, for all sorts of reasons that I won’t bore you with.  There are several moments like that in the film.  Here’s another one:

“Have you ever done that before, like, when there’s a party in your house?  Sometimes it’s easiest to rest when you go off by yourself and you can still hear the noise of the party, and you feel safe knowing that so many people are around, that you can have a rest?”

I identified with that so strongly that I can point to events in my life when I did exactly that, literally.  Hearing those words spoken in Marcel’s guileless, childlike tones almost felt…I might be overstating this a little…therapeutic.  It was a mildly bizarre experience for me.

Meanwhile, in events that uncannily mirror exactly what happened with the original Marcel shorts in real life, Dean posts his videos online and starts getting a phenomenal response.  He suggests that Marcel post a plea online to see if the online community can help track down his family.  This leads to some rather unfortunate attention-seekers, but it does provide a motivation for Marcel to take his first trip to the outside world, riding on the dashboard of Dean’s car.  If the idea of a teeny tiny seashell getting carsick and vomiting a teeny tiny little bit and apologizing every time…if you don’t find that even a little cute, I pity you.

Events progress rapidly (the movie is just over 90 minutes long).  There is an incident involving Nana Connie and some hooligans who break into the Airbnb.  The producers of 60 Minutes reach out to Dean and Marcel and ask if Lesley Stahl can come to the house and interview them.  Marcel says no, not until Nana Connie is better.  …and what happens after that I will not reveal, because it involves some of the most heartfelt passages of the film as the depth of Marcel’s relationship with his grandmother is tested, and the grandmother displays the kind of wisdom and sacrifice that would feel at home in an O. Henry story.

When so many films out there celebrate cynicism and snark, what a treat it is to find one that just wants to make you feel a little better.  I could not put it any better than Marcel himself:

“Guess why I smile a lot.  Uh, ‘cause it’s worth it.”

THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
CAST: Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello, Dianne Wiest, and…Jeff Daniels
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Fresh

PLOT: In 1935 New Jersey, a movie character walks off the screen and into the real-world life of a lonely, unhappily married woman.


I can imagine that it would be absurdly easy to poke holes in The Purple Rose of Cairo.  The premise is outlandish, taking place in the real world but firmly in the realm of fantasy.  It stretches the suspension of disbelief to the breaking point, then goes a little further.  It asks the audience member to forget cynicism and snark for eighty-two minutes and give in to the kind of hopeless romanticism that exists only on the movie screen.  And then, amid all that glorious make-believe, it abruptly confronts you with the knowledge that, yes, this kind of thing really does only happen in the movies, and the real world can be messy and unforgiving and sad.  Yes…but at our lowest points, we can always turn to Fred and Ginger, and Bogey and Bacall, and Luke and Leia, and Gene Kelly, and Hogwarts and the Emerald City.  The Purple Rose of Cairo reminds us that the movies allow us to escape reality for an hour or three.  Sign me up.

This movie’s plot is the embodiment of the “high-concept pitch.”  What if a movie character walked off the movie screen and tried to live in the real world?  I don’t have any statistics to support this, but I’m pretty sure there are at least 18,337 other films with variations of this fish-out-of-water scenario, most memorably Splash, Last Action Hero, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

In this version, Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, a semi-depressed housewife in 1935 New Jersey, living in a small town still in the grips of the Great Depression.  Her husband, Monk (Danny Aiello), claims he’s looking for work, but we only ever see him pitching pennies with his buddies or making life miserable for Cecilia at home.  Her wages from her waitressing job go directly to rent and groceries, and anything left over goes to Monk.  Amid this bleakness, Cecilia goes to see the new film opening at the local theater, The Purple Rose of Cairo, starring a dashingly handsome actor named Gil Shepherd in the supporting role of archaeologist Tom Baxter (both roles played by a young Jeff Daniels).  She is swept away by the glitter, glamour, and romance of the film.

Imagine her surprise when, during one of the many screenings she attends, Tom Baxter abruptly stops mid-sentence, breaks the fourth wall, and speaks directly to Cecilia from up on the screen.  “My God, you must really love this picture…I gotta speak to you.”  And he simply walks off the screen, much to the consternation of the movie audience, and walks out of the theater, arm in arm with Cecilia.  The wit with which Woody Allen handles the reactions of the audience AND the movie characters Tom leaves behind is priceless.  The characters and the real people react with perfect logic, so the effect is not one of slapstick (I can see an Adam Sandler version of this movie beating the joke to death), but one of a strange mixture of high and low comedy.  To relate the scenes here word for word would ruin the magic.  (An African-American maid steals every scene she’s in.)  Tom and Cecilia go off together, and the rest of the film is, from a plot perspective, fairly predictable.

What makes this movie unique is how it tells the story.  Tom knows what an amusement park is, but he has no clue what popcorn tastes like.  (“Been watching people eat it for all those performances.  When they rattle those bags, though, that’s annoying.”)  He has fallen instantly in love with Cecilia…love at first sight.  Tom hides in the city, and Cecilia lies to Monk to go back and see Tom the next night.  A nice touch comes when calls start coming in to RKO that the Tom Baxter character in prints being shown in other cities is also trying to escape his gilded silver-screen cage.  (“He almost made it in Detroit.”)  There’s the inevitable showdown between Tom and Monk.  Tom only knows the moves he uses on film, but Monk fights dirty.  However, the fight still doesn’t end quite as I expected…another nice touch.

The real crisis occurs when the studio calls in Gil Shepherd, the actor who PLAYS Tom Baxter, to New Jersey so he can try to wrangle his creation back into the movie where he belongs.  There is the expected confusion when Cecilia bumps into Gil, mistaking him for Tom.  The plot thickens even more when Gil starts falling in love with Cecilia herself, and she finds herself in a pickle.  She tells Gil, “I just met a wonderful new man.  He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”

The commentary being made here regarding our fascination with movie characters (and the movies themselves) as opposed to the actors who play them seems simple, but in trying to analyze it like a “real” critic, I feel helpless in the face of the ingenuity of the situation.  My words aren’t doing justice to the almost poetic elegance on display.  The more you love movies, the more you’ll appreciate what I’m desperately trying to convey.

There are two moments/sequences that elevate The Purple Rose of Cairo from a dramatic exercise into the realm of genuine movie magic.  One is when Tom wants to show Cecilia a night on the town, but they have no money (Cecilia is broke, and all of Tom’s movie money is fake).  But he remembers that, in the “fake” Purple Rose movie, the scene coming up after the one he abandoned takes all the characters to the Copacabana.  It’s here that the viewer simply must suspend what little disbelief remains and give in to the simple but grand gesture of watching Cecilia herself appear on the black-and-white screen with all of the people she’s been watching night after night.  They go to the Copa, and after watching the singer who’s supposed to be Tom Baxter’s love interest, Tom and Cecilia head out for a night on the town, as only 1930’s movies could provide.  (The maître d’ provides one of the movies biggest laughs when he suddenly realizes he can do whatever he wants…and does.)

But the greatest moment is the very ending, which I will try desperately not to spoil here.  It’s here where we get to the heart of what Woody Allen is really trying to say: The movies are here and real life is there, and never the twain shall meet.  Is this a depressing point of view?  Well, I mean…yeah, a little.  But it’s also indisputably true.  If we walked around like we were actually in a movie, we’d never lock our doors behind us when we walked into our apartment.  Everyone’s phone numbers would begin with “555”.  We’d turn on the light when answering the phone at night (who does that, really?).  But in the real world, none of that is true.  In the real world, hearts get broken, sometimes for good.  We get fired.  People die.  WE die.  Love the movies, Allen is saying, but never forget that you’re flesh and bone, and that actions have consequences.  I’m reminded of a good line from Ready Player One: “As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place that you can get a decent meal.”

The final shot of the movie, of Cecilia smiling through her tears, moved me like I’ve rarely been moved before.  It reminded me, perversely, of some of the worst times in my life because it was at those dark times that the movies came to my aid.  I went through a fair episode of depression in my twenties; a friend showed me Harold and Maude, and it literally changed my life.  During the Covid lockdown, I was furloughed, and the maddening Florida unemployment website sapped my will to live, figuratively speaking; my best friend, out of the blue, bought me a copy of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker just to cheer me up…and it did.  During that same period, several different films were in constant rotation in my movie room, all of which provided spectacular ways of escaping real life: Blade Runner 2049, Prometheus, The Martian, Interstellar, Gravity, and Sunshine [2007].  Not all laugh riots, to be sure, but they were excellent tonics against the constant worry of unemployment and disease.

And in 2017, Hurricane Irma threatened Florida.  For the first time, I was genuinely frightened that we would finally see real danger from a hurricane.  Miraculously, a local multiplex chose to stay open until almost the eleventh hour, and to get our minds off the approaching storm, I took my girlfriend to see the new remake of Stephen King’s It.  For two hours, we got scared out of our wits in the best way possible.  We escaped reality, and collectively we had our real-world fears literally exorcised.  I cannot tell you how grateful we were to have that brief respite from our troubles.

Those are the memories that came back to me in the final sequence of The Purple Rose of Cairo.  Yes, the real world is still the only place to get a decent meal, and it remains imperfect and sometimes painful.  But the movies are as close as a button click or a car ride.  They’re implausible and sometimes unrealistic and not always perfectly written.  But The Purple Rose of Cairo just wants to remind us of their power to cheer us up and transport us.

THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT (United Kingdom, 1982)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Peter Greenaway
CAST: Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman, Ann-Louise Lambert, Hugh Fraser
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Fresh

PLOT: An insouciant young artist is commissioned by the wife of a wealthy landowner to make a series of drawings of the estate while her husband is away.


The directorial debut film of Peter Greenaway at first feels like a mashup of earlier British period films, most notably Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones.  It contains much of the painterly beauty and some – not a lot – of the stateliness of Kubrick’s film, combined with the irreverence of Tom Jones, especially concerning sexual matters.  However, The Draughtsman’s Contract makes its own mark, particularly in the closing sequences when revelations occur throwing everything that has come before into a different light.  In behind-the-scenes interviews on the Blu-ray, multiple people say multiple times that the clues to the mystery that pops up unexpectedly are hidden in plain sight.  Well, kudos to the filmmakers, because I was fooled.

The story takes place in 1694 in one of the more beautiful portions of the English countryside.  A dimly-lit prologue establishes the particulars: Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins, whom you may recognize as Sherlock Holmes’s mentor in Young Sherlock Holmes [1985]) is a talented but arrogant draughtsman (pronounced “draftsman”), much in demand for the quality of his pencil drawings.  After much prodding from Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) and her married daughter, Mrs. Talmann (Anne-Louise Lambert), he is persuaded to enter into a contract to produce twelve drawings of Mrs. Herbert’s country estate while Mr. Herbert is away on business.  But because Mr. Neville is abandoning a previous commitment, he insists that his payment be his regular fee, full room and board on the estate…and one private visit each day to Mrs. Herbert so that she may “comply with his requests concerning his pleasure.”  I would say that this may have influenced Jane Campion’s masterpiece The Piano, except the favors in The Piano evolve into something deeper, while the favors in Contract have no deeper level than satisfying Mr. Neville’s appetites.

Given the reputed over-the-top nature of Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (unseen by me so far), I expected the scenes depicting Mrs. Herbert’s contractual obligations to be far more explicit than what is shown.  This is not a criticism.  I think, for this film, that kind of attention-getting device would detract from the narrative momentum Greenaway achieves.  Since the movie is extremely dialogue-heavy, we are better served by short scenes leaving no question as to the liberties taken by Mr. Neville, so we may return expeditiously to the plot.

(I stand corrected: there is one brief but potentially stomach-churning shot of Mrs. Herbert dealing with the effects of eating something that perhaps did not entirely agree with her…eeyuck.)

Leaving those interludes aside, the film is essentially a series of deliberately wordy conversations among Mr. Neville, his servant, Mrs. Talmann, Mrs. Herbert, etcetera, while we also watch Mr. Neville practicing his craft.  Using an ingenious device I’ve never seen before, he sets up a framed grid of wires on a tripod so that the object he’s drawing is divided into multiple squares.  Then he simply draws an expanded version of the framed object onto his sketchpad, grid by grid.  (My girlfriend and I used a variation of this same process to draw Timon from The Lion King at Animal Kingdom.)

His one guiding rule is: “Draw what you see, not what you know.”  As such, if the view has changed in any way when he returns to each site, he immediately incorporates those changes into his drawing, whether the changes be as simple as the addition of a ladder on the side of a building or more complex, like adding a dog standing outside a greenhouse.  This credo will come back to haunt Mr. Neville in ways he cannot anticipate.

A mystery arises.  Mr. Herbert never returns from his business trip.  His horse is found wandering the estate.  No one can confirm his arrival at his destination.  Articles of Mr. Herbert’s clothing suddenly appear here and there around the estate…and as such, immediately become part of Neville’s drawings.

And what’s the story with the occasional appearance of a naked man whom we, the audience, can see, but which the movie characters cannot?  True, he’s not quite in anyone’s field of vision, except twice, when a child can clearly see him, but his guardian cannot, and when a steward shoos him away off a bridge.  I have gone over his scenes in my head multiple times, and I still cannot grasp the significance of this anomaly.  Director Greenaway was a painter before he became a filmmaker (indeed, it is his hands we see making Neville’s sketches), so presumably there’s a reason behind it.  Is this man a Fellini-esque or Lynchian sideshow, intended to raise questions without answering them?  Or is this man a visual representation of the “paint what you see, not what you know” philosophy?  If we extend that rule to our lives, are we being encouraged not to ignore the fanciful, the odd, the unusual, simply because they may not fit in the limited framework of our beliefs and/or prejudices?  Perhaps the child could see this man because he did not yet have any prejudices that would exclude him from his awareness, whereas his guardian simply sees a wall, or a statue, because that’s easier to deal with.  Discuss.

Whatever this naked man represents is secondary, at least during the film, to what happens among Mr. Neville, Mrs. Herbert, and her daughter Mrs. Tallman.  I especially enjoyed just listening to them talk.  In its own way, The Draughtsman’s Contract reminded me of the films of Tarantino, where outrageous incidents or conduct are always framed by characters who talk and talk.  What a treat it is sometimes to just listen to dialogue that doesn’t feel like it was generated at the cliché factory.  Some examples:

  • “Why is that Dutchman waving his arms about?  Is he homesick for windmills?”
  • “When your speech is as coarse as your face, Louis, then you sound as impotent by day as you perform by night.”
  • “He doesn’t like to see the fish.  Carp live too long…they remind him of Catholics.”
  • “Your inventory, Louis, is unlimited, like your long, clean, white breeches.  There is nothing of substance in either of them.”

And so on.  Full disclosure: before the eventual resolution of Mr. Herbert’s disappearance and the subtle change in relationship between Mr. Neville and Mrs. Herbert, I was resigned to the idea that the movie had nothing else to offer, plot-wise, and I was mentally giving the film a more mediocre score.  But good things come to those who wait.  Give The Draughtsman’s Contract a chance, and you will find, as I did, that Greenaway has a few surprises in store for anyone who thinks they know how this story will end.

GET CARTER (United Kingdom, 1971)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Mike Hodges
CAST: Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland, John Osborne
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Fresh

PLOT: When his brother dies under mysterious circumstances, London gangster Jack Carter travels to Newcastle to investigate.


While watching 1971’s Get Carter (Caine, not Stallone), I was reminded of so many other later films that I began to wonder what gangster/crime films weren’t influenced by Get Carter.  Throughout the picture, I could see hints and whispers of Bugsy, Beverly Hills Cop, Carlito’s Way, and the John Wick franchise, among others.  I probably missed some.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe those films weren’t paying homage to the best British film ever made (according to a 2004 poll), at least not consciously.  But its DNA is there for anyone who knows where to look.

(To be sure, Get Carter was itself influenced by earlier authors and films.  In very broad strokes, the plot of Get Carter resembles The Big Sleep.  In both films, a hard, cynical man tries to get to the bottom of a mystery that no one else is particularly interested in solving.  They both even involve pornography, though to be sure that was more implied in the older film, while in Get Carter we are left in no doubt.)

The tone of Get Carter matches its protagonist: cold, flat, uninflected, violent only when it has to be.  Michael Caine’s performance is a masterpiece of understated, simmering viciousness.  He only gets really angry a few times in the film, and he doesn’t smile, not genuinely, until the very end.  I read on IMDb that Caine’s intention was to show a more realistic, less sensational kind of violence than had been seen in earlier gangster films, “never using thirty punches when one would do.”

This is also an echo of a French film, Le samouraï, in which a professional killer shows absolutely no expressions the entire film, even with a gun in his face.  Carter is equally cool under pressure, as in the scene when he is surprised in the act of “lovemaking” (love has nothing to do with it) by two gangsters.  He registers surprise and little else, pulling a double-barreled shotgun from under the bed and, while stark naked, marching his would-be attackers out of the flat at gunpoint.  In a movie with little to no humor, there is a welcome double-take from the nosey next-door neighbor, not to mention the children’s parade taking place down the street.  (In this scene, there is something very Bond-like about Carter, mixing deadly danger with borderline slapstick.)

1971 was not a year for shrinking violets at the movies.  It saw the release of Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, and The French Connection, among others.  Into this mix comes Get Carter with its casual violence and frequent female nudity, profanity, and so on.  Even so, there were a couple of moments that got a little shock out of me.  One was when a car is disposed of while Carter knows what precious cargo is in the trunk, but the bad guys do not.  Watch Carter’s utter impassiveness; he could have raised a warning, but he doesn’t.  There’s cold, and then there’s cold.  Another shocking moment is when Carter absentmindedly turns on a film projector and watches the amateur porn film displayed on the wall.  Watch his face again as he slowly realizes the identity of one of the actresses in this tawdry film.  A tear rolls down his face.  Because of what we already know about Carter, that tear doesn’t just mean he’s grieving.  He’s so boiling mad that I feared for the life of the woman in the next room.  It’s a great moment because of how rarely we see emotion on his face.

Get Carter is classic noir, just in color and with more adult situations.  Carter may not be a cop, but he has a code, nonetheless.  He absolutely will not stop digging until he solves the question of his brother’s death.  He defies his own bosses in London, ignores many warnings, survives several attempts on his life, but he just can’t help himself.  His obsession trumps everything else, just like Bogey in The Big Sleep or William Hurt in Body Heat.  There are hints of tragedy at every turn, but Carter presses on, whatever the cost, even if he thinks he might not like what he finds.  These are the qualities of any great noir hero, and Carter exemplifies them all.

***SPOILER ALERT AHEAD, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:***

I feel obligated to mention my reaction, at least briefly, to the film’s ending.  At first, I threw my hands in the air, much as I did at the ending of…well, another very different film from the late ‘60s.  But as I thought back to the events of the film leading to this moment, I had to shrug and say to myself, “Well…it’s not like they didn’t warn him.”  At least it’s motivated by something, and not just random fate.  I can accept it.  It’s not something you would see in a conventional Hollywood film today, that’s for sure.  Look at John Wick.

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Howard Hawks
CAST: Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Coburn
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 88% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A couple of showgirls on a cruise to France get themselves involved in a plot involving a private detective, a diamond tiara, and the occasional musical number.


Why did I watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical from 1953 featuring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe?  Well, it happens to be listed in the movie compendium 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, for one thing.  And there’s the uber-famous production number “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” performed by Marilyn Monroe in that iconic pink dress that showcased her shimmy like nothing else I can think of.  And it’s directed by Howard Hawks, one of my favorite directors from Hollywood’s golden years (His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby, many others).

While the song and the actors and the direction are competent, I didn’t quite get involved in the story as much as I hoped I would.  There’s no denying the wattage generated by Monroe whenever she’s on screen, and the screenplay by Charles Lederer provides some amazing little zingers, some of which I’m shocked got past the 1953 censors.  (When a man is asked which girl he would save from drowning first, Russell or Monroe, the man replies in admiration, “Those girls couldn’t drown.”)  But the plot, which I won’t even bother describing here, is merely a nail on which to hang those visuals of Jane and Marilyn strutting their stuff in exuberant Technicolor dresses and the occasional song or three.  Make no mistake, from a narrative standpoint, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is pure farce, top to bottom.  (And no wonder, it’s based on a stage musical.)  You either give in to the formula or you don’t.  And I’ll admit, there were times when I didn’t.  There’s a song and dance number at a Parisian café which I thought was unnecessary, and the tortuous route traveled by the tiara, especially its final hiding place, stretched the logical part of my brain to the limit.

But, on the other hand…yeah, it was fun.  Set logic aside and surrender to the sights and sounds, and Gentlemen provides substantial eye and ear candy.  And there are some genuine laughs.  Like the subplot about Monroe looking through the passenger manifest looking for gentlemen traveling “with valets”, who must therefore be rich.  She finds one, Henry Spofford III, and arranges for him to be seated at her dinner table.  The revelation of Mr. Spofford’s true nature is one of the comic high points.

Or the bit towards the end where Jane Russell gets to have her cake and eat it, too.  Thanks to the machinations of the plot, Russell not only gets top billing for the movie, but she also gets to lampoon her sexy costar by impersonating Marilyn Monroe.  (In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that her appearance in a courtroom wearing a fur coat that conceals all until she crosses her fishnet-clad legs may have provided at least SOME inspiration to that one scene in Basic Instinct.  YOU know which scene I’m talking about, perv.)

But when it comes down to it, if for nothing else, you’ve got to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes just to see Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”  She may play ditzy and dumb for the whole rest of the movie, but in this number, Monroe is totally and fully in command of her body, the camera, and the audience in that strapless pink dress which looks like it’s held up by sheer willpower.  For several minutes, she coos, struts, bumps, shimmies and shakes, and there’s nothing you can do but just watch in awe.  Almost as much as she did in Some Like It Hot, she simply embodies sexual…sexual…you know what, she just embodies sex.  I suppose there’s a more literary way to describe it, but I’m too tired to think of it.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes may not feature the dancing feet of Gwen Verdon or Gene Kelly, or the vocal stylings of Debbie Reynolds or, well, Gene Kelly, or the literary complexity of West Side Story or A Star Is Born.  But when you have a song and dance number that is literally inimitable (sorry, Madonna, nice try), who cares?  I can think of plenty of worse ways to spend an evening than watching Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe for 90 minutes.

[Side note: Penni was NOT a fan of how Monroe’s character constantly called her fiancé “daddy.”  Not sure why I’m mentioning that, but it just made it funnier to me every time Monroe said it.]

LOCAL HERO (United Kingdom, 1983)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Bill Forsyth
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, Fulton Mackay, Denis Lawson, Peter Capaldi
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An American oil company has plans for a new refinery and sends someone to Scotland to buy up an entire village, but things don’t go as expected.


Local Hero is not normally the kind of movie I gravitate to.  It’s not slow, but it’s deliberate.  It’s not hilarious, but it’s funny.  It’s not plotless, but it meanders and skips around.  It’s not flashy, it’s not glossy, and it’s not kinetic.  I can easily remember a version of myself that might have turned this movie off after the first thirty minutes.

But today, at this time in my life, for whatever reason, something made me look at this movie in a different way than I might have once upon a time.  The movie started to resemble a memory.  Not one of my memories, but like someone else’s memory, like I was listening to someone tell a story about this one time when he went to Scotland and something happened that didn’t exactly change his life, but it made him look at the world differently.  Fiction or not, Local Hero plays not as a movie, but as a recollection.  Its charm carried me through the entire film.

And I’m not talking about the kind of charm you might see in any 2 or 3 movies set in Scotland or Ireland.  Normally, in films set in and around the British Isles, the villages one might find there are laid back, yes, but filled with eccentric characters who know each other’s business, are friendly but cautious around outsiders, and who are loud and boisterous at the local pub.  In Local Hero, the most eccentric characters are the Americans, and the village pub might fill up, but you’ll never have to raise your voice to be heard.  It’s an interesting switch.

The story: A Texas oil company wants to buy the entire village of Ferness in Scotland so it can turn the surrounding area into a giant oil refinery.  The company’s CEO, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), sends a junior executive, Mac (Peter Riegert), to Scotland to facilitate the deal.  When Mac arrives, he gets his first taste of culture shock, not due to all the eccentricities he finds, but due to how quiet this town is.  He is checked into the local hotel by Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson, aka “Wedge Antilles” in the Star Wars films), who also turns out to be the town’s bartender, the town treasurer, and the head chef in the hotel’s kitchen.  Mac is accompanied by an eager Scottish assistant, Oldsen (an impossibly young Peter Capaldi), who develops a crush on a local scientist and runs from one assignment to another as if his arms were on fire.

Local Hero throws curveballs every chance it gets.  You’d expect the citizenry to get indignant at the idea of an American mega-corporation wanting to buy their town.  But when the locals get an idea of how much each person would get, they become instant supporters.  When they all convene at the local church, the Reverend is not an inexperienced youth or a crusty old soul, but an African gentleman who, according to the story he tells Mac, came to Scotland to learn the ministry and just…never left.  Happer, the CEO, insists on periodic updates from Mac, and since this is 1983, Mac has to call Texas from a red phone booth just outside the hotel.  But Happer seems less interested in the deal than in the potential discovery of a comet, somewhere in the constellation Virgo.

All of this is told in the laid-back manner of someone telling a story around a campfire.  There are little jumps forward that omit what might seem to be key information, but we pick up on it right away.  Little details emerge, like the motorcyclist who always seems to be roaring down the town boulevard just in time to nearly run Mac over.  There’s a moment when Mac encounters a group of men near the beach, has a pleasant conversation, then notices a baby in a stroller.  “Whose baby?”  His question is met with an uncomfortable silence as the men slowly look at each other, and Mac wonders what just happened.  And the beautiful thing is, that’s it.  That’s the end of the scene.  No one ever answers the question, and we never find out why not.

That kind of thing would normally infuriate me, but in this movie, it reinforced the idea of a fond memory.  I can easily imagine someone telling the story and saying, “And that was it!  No one ever said whose baby it was!  I still don’t know whose baby it was!”  It has the ring of real life, it’s not played up for laughs, and there’s no punchline at the end.  The punchline is that there IS no punchline.

There is a nice moment when Mac has had one or two whiskeys too many one night, and he gets on the phone with Happer in that red phone booth.  Suddenly, the sky starts to glow and glisten – the aurora borealis.  Mac gets excited and tries to explain to Happer what’s going on, but he lacks the vocabulary.  “I wish I could describe it to you like I’m seeing it!”  I know how he feels.  It’s how I felt when I went to Alaska for the first time in decades and traveled on a cruise ship through a narrow fjord and saw towering cliffs covered in trees and intermittent waterfalls cascading over rocks so everything looked primeval, like something out of The Lord of the Rings.  Just describing it doesn’t convey how it felt.  It’s a short moment in the movie, but I felt the reality of it in my bones.

In an interview on the Criterion Blu-ray, the film’s producer, David Puttnam, talks about how, when this movie was made, the general public’s idea of comedy was Airplane! and Blazing Saddles.  If it wasn’t zany, it wasn’t considered a comedy.  He wanted to help make a film that tried to remind audiences that comedy doesn’t automatically mean pratfalls and fart jokes.  Comedy can be gentle.  Local Hero is as gentle as they come.  It’s marvelous closing shot speaks volumes, and it wouldn’t have had the same impact if the story had been told any other way.